


The Quiet Gift

by lexicale



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-29
Updated: 2012-09-29
Packaged: 2017-11-15 05:59:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lexicale/pseuds/lexicale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years later, they're keeping on keeping on. And they have a farmhouse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quiet Gift

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a challenge. Prompt genre was future-fic and promp kink was tattooing/branding.

"And you're sure you're doin' alright?" Bobby's voice crackles down the line, and only made worse by the hoarse grumble of old age. Service out here isn't exactly cutting edge and good old fashioned landlines are how things run. Dean doesn't complain. It's exactly what he was looking for.

"I'm _fine,_ Bobby, I swear," he replies with a smile, knowing that Bobby'll be able to hear the expression through the phone, hear it in the way that Dean's mouth moves. It doesn't matter how many times he promises -- Bobby always asks, every time.

"I jus' don't like you livin' out there all by your lonesome."

"This coming from the guy who's lived like a hermit in his salvage yard for the last fifty years?"

_"Forty_ years, and you know that ain't the same, boy."

Dean sighs. Doesn't seem to matter how old he gets. Even at forty five he's still 'boy' to Bobby.

The rest of the conversation goes much the same as the last two hundred, Bobby worrying about Dean and Dean doing his best to reassure the man. He's lived out here for more than ten years now, and paid off the down payment Bobby helped him with back in the day.

Dean Winchester is well and truly settled.

It's not as weird or uncomfortable as he'd always imagined, in his youth. At fifteen, twenty, twenty five, the idea of being tied down, living in the same spot and always the same routine was like a nightmare to him. Something the masses should be pitied for, not envied. He'd never understood why Sam's eyes filled with longing whenever they were driving out of whatever small town dump they were staying in. 

He gets it now.

Took him about ten years of pain and deals and crossroads and suffering, ten years of losing, always losing, and nothing but pretty pictures in his rearview mirror, but he gets it now. And honestly, he just wishes he'd gotten it sooner.

He walks out of the kitchen, over the creaking floorboards to the door into the living room, descending a couple of steps into it. The farmhouse is old but in good condition -- it wasn't, when he bought it. Broken and rotted out, Dean and Bobby had looked at the plumbing and the foundations and declared them good, no leaks in the roof and really, everything else was cosmetic. Dean had spent the last ten years fixing the place up, sanding the old floors and replacing the windows and painting the shit out of everything. The to-do list never gets any shorter, even after ten years, but he at least feels some pride walking through the sunlit rooms and knowing it looks as good as it does because of him.

Mostly him, anyways.

"How you doing?" he asks, moving around the couch and looking down at his brother, spread stomach down across the coffee table. Sam’s shirt is off and back bared, pants pushed down a little to reveal the tops of his hipbones, and Dean can see the slight tension under the other man's skin.

"Alright," Sam replies, voice a little tight but trying for casual. Dean always expected this to eventually become routine for them, but instead it's become a ritual that serves to remind them that this is their life now. 

A good life, Dean thinks, but he knows Sam still carries some guilt.

As if Dean would want to be anywhere else than here.

Dean seats himself in the chair next to the table, reaching out to brush his hand over Sam's back, the skin feeling clammy and Dean watches the dark marks of the tattoos shift with the touch.

The most perfect vessel on the face of the Earth -- of all time, he's heard. A body designed from the chromosome up to accommodate Satan himself. A body capable of holding the Devil. Sam doesn't look it, to Dean, but then again, he never has. Dean only sees the soul that no one else seems to give a shit about -- the soul that's just an inconvenience to them, unimportant and to be discarded. A worthless knick-knack.

No one but Meg had dared to tempt the Devil's wrath by stealing his intended vessel before it was time, but afterwards... Well. That was different.

After it was all over, after the apocalypse had been averted and all the dangers associated with it locked away, when there was no chance of Lucifer ever again using his tailor-made suit, Sam was on the market and that little anti-possession tat would only keep out the riff-raff.

Demons, arch demons, angels and the highest host of Heaven -- all of them wanted a piece of Dean's little brother. All of them wanted to set up shop inside of Sam and call it home. 

A vessel they could never be purged from, a vessel that would never ache or breakdown or suffer. A vessel that could accommodate any power, no matter how great.

A vessel that could hold God himself and not even blink.

Sam was the perfect ride, and once the claim on him had been revoked, it had become open season, with every asshole from Heaven on down looking to plant their flag. There was no symbol on Earth that could keep all of that out.

Not a chance.

"Bobby alright?" Sam asks. His arms are folded on the table, cheek resting against them. His hair is long, longer even than it was ten years ago, and it brushes his shoulders in shaggy whorls, curling against his face. Dean picks up a cloth and some rubbing alcohol, sanitizing his hands.

"Doin' okay," Dean responds, scrubbing the rag thoroughly against his skin. "The usual. Wants me to give up this place. Go back to hunting or move in with him or whatever."

Sam huffs. It's a noncommittal sound, and Dean doesn't know what it means just yet -- Sam always takes his time coming around to whatever's on his mind.

"You..." his brother starts. Pauses. "...you could, you know."

"Don't be an idiot," Dean responds, tossing the rag down and reaching for the inks and the tattoo gun. They used needles and ball point pens, back in the day, but after ten years and a steady legal income, they've upgraded. "We've had this conversation. I'm not going anywhere."

"They can't find me. They don't even know to look for me. You don't have to stay here--"

"Sam," Dean interrupts, that sharp tone that he's used since he was eight and had to stop Sam from touching Dad's chainsaw with voice alone. On kid-Sam, it had worked one hundred percent of the time. On adult-Sam, it's a fifty/fifty kind of thing. "We've talked about this. Like a thousand times."

"Still," Sam pushes bravely on, but Dean doesn't let him get far.

"I'm done with hunting, Sam. Been done with it for years. We got something good here, okay? Stop trying to ruin it with your man-angst." He shoves Sam's side and hears his brother huff, and Dean may be a grown man, heading right into middle age, even, but he'll be eighty and stuffed full of hearing aids before he consents to a big long heart-to-heart. "We're good. We've been good. We're going to be good. So shut up and let me do my thing."

Sam grunts, but Dean can see the small quirk of his brother's lips. Dean smirks to himself and settles for that.

He looks at Sam's back, a canvas worked by Dean over the last ten years, inexpertly at first, lines all wobbly and immature, but the later stuff is pretty good if Dean does say so himself. Dean lays his hand in the center, over the lock of the spell, where they'd mixed the ink with Dean's blood and made him the key. Made Dean the only creature from Heaven to Hell that was exempt. 

Dean rubs his thumb against it fondly, then gets his supplies in order.

He has work to do.

'Once a year' was what the witch had said to them, telling them what they had to do, before she'd forgot them entirely. Once a year -- to refresh the spell, to keep it strong, and Dean never misses the day.

"Happy Birthday, Sammy," he murmurs, sees his brother smile, before Dean turns on the gun and lays it against Sam's skin, watching as it darkens and turns black, watching as the lines appear, steady and even.

There's no spell in the world that could keep Sam safe, that could keep all the forces of the world out of a body built and intended to be a vessel. A body just _looking_ for someone else to fill it up.

Dean couldn't keep them out, so he'd settled for keeping them from looking. 

Dean's not just the only person in the world who knows where Sam Winchester is.

He's the only person who remembers that he ever existed at all.


End file.
